Exhuming the Horrors That Made Us
by I'm in Loaf with You
Summary: Haunted by the horrifying death of his younger brother, Yaud and his house servant, a Sableye named Igor, traverse the Kalos region to uncover the mystery of Igor's past. Along the way, Yaud comes to grips with his mortality, searches for answers to the age-old questions of life and death, and somehow finds himself challenging the Kalos League.
1. Us

Author's Note: Please forgive me for any weirdness/inconsistencies in tone as I try to find my footing :) Enjoy, and I love hearing feedback!

 **Exhuming the Horrors That Made Us  
** **Chapter One  
** **Us**

" _From the elephant to the flea, from the flea to the sensitive living atom, the origin of all, there is no point in nature but that which suffers and enjoys."  
_ —Denis Diderot, from _The Dream of d'Alembert_

* * *

Up in the moldy attic, where the inch-sized corpses of baby spider Pokémon rest half-decomposed amid tangles of itchy pink fiberglass, an eighteen year old girl with rosy cheeks and dithering eyes stands feebly like an acrophobic on a mountaintop. An eerie humming sound sends a chill down her spine, though she knows it's just the vents settling in the cool of the night. Downstairs, the indistinct chatter of the television and the frantic shuffling of her father's footsteps help her feel as though she is not alone in this arachnid gravesite after all. A Magmar plush doll, stuffing drooping out of a tear in its left-side abdomen, is held tenuously in her hands as her eyes dart from cardboard box to cardboard box. She is looking for a sewing kit.

Her patience for this creepy ambience dwindling, she bumbles over to a small box marked in the illegible scrawl of black permanent felt-tip and pries open the flaps. She sets Maggie down beside her. Inside, there is an eclectic assortment of occult trinkets and documents that gives a sense of what a necromancer might store in a time capsule. Her eyes fall on a tattered manual entitled _Beginner Mediumship_ by Miss Edith. As she picks it up, an old photograph slips out from between the sweet-tea-stained pages.

The photograph floods her with nostalgia; memory upon memory pours in from her times living in Ecruteak City. In the photograph, she poses in front of the burned-down Brass Tower, a charred shadow of its former glory, while out with her friends for one of their favorite pass-times: Magmar-watching.

A hundred years ago, not long after the Bell Tower lost its twin to the fire, a troop of nomadic Magmar took up permanent residence in the scorched cellar and began thriving as a settlement. It wasn't unusual to see Magmar and Magby taking afternoon naps out in the front lawn of the tower, sequestered in by a metal enclosure set up by the city both to ensure that its citizens do not suffer third degree burns and to prevent innocence-pleading poachers from capturing a member of these exotic species and splitting their families apart.

Magmar had since developed into something of a cultural icon for Ecruteak City, being featured on its flags, its tourism brochures, and numerous cartoon animations. Magmar had become Ecruteak's pride and joy, its battling mascot, and one of the most popular choices for plush dolls among young girls. The girl in the attic has had Maggie since she was six. She would never forgive herself were she to allow her lifelong companion to go unrepaired.

She begins to flip through the pages of _Beginner Mediumship_. She thinks of the mediumship classes she took at Ecruteak Gym, where she learned, among other things, how to attract, capture, and raise Ghost Pokémon; how to control her premonitions and predict the near future with 65% certainty; how to willfully enter trance and—god forbid—allow a spirit to possess her!

The look of epiphany takes over her face.

"How in hell did I not think of this sooner? It's genius," she mutters. She takes one final cursory look through the box before scrambling towards the exit, anxious to evacuate this pungent chamber of decay. Despite all her psychic schooling, this attic still always manages to instill within her an unshakeable sensation of disquiet, of being watched. With manual in hand, she clambers down the ladder and collapses it with minimal difficulty. She pushes the hatch shut and does not look back.

It has been four years since Meredith moved from Ecruteak to Lumiose. In those four years, she has made many mistakes as an inevitable result of the process of growing up. She has made the mistake of underestimating the brutality of female menstruation. She has made the mistake of assuming that the path to a boy's heart was an easygoing stroll and not an obstacle course. She has made the mistake of believing that God had never indulged in a sprightly guffaw over pies-in-the-face or molested children. And tonight, she has made the especially grave mistake of deciding not to return to the attic that night.

Meredith has made many mistakes. But if she was right about one thing, it was that up in that moldering attic, where the putridity of the wood, the throngs of dust bunnies, and the deserted cobwebs of spiders-now-cadavers sponsored an atmosphere rife with the portent of death so poignant so as to awaken that primal fear of the grim reaper or the bogey under our bed furtively embossed deep in the sheltered recesses of our minds, the kind of primal fear that triggers even the most intrepid of adventurers and the most apex of predators to rethink whether they truly are safe in the dark; if Meredith was right about one thing, it was that up in that attic, she was not alone.

" _You said we would be together forever. I didn't know that meant only until death_."

* * *

Two weeks have passed since Merry hologrammed me to inform me of her frankly asinine and hubristic plan, which she—over-charitably, I might add—characterized as a "brilliant idea" and something over which I would "melt into a blissful ooze." I mean—what? A blissful ooze? Let's not get ahead of ourselves, considering that her idea is for us to hold a _goddamn séance_. I mean, _that_ was what was so brilliant? I would almost rather saw off my fingers with a string of floss than indulge her in her wanton ghost fetishes.

Yet here I am, standing stalwart in her dining room as I silently but judgmentally watch her and Missy, her Misdreavus, prepare the séance materials on a small table. Spazzing out in the corner is sapphire-eyed Igor, my Sableye, whose all too frequent convulsions freak the apathy out of most people that pass him by. Cuffed to both of his wrists are a pair of heavy steel manacles, each with its own ten-foot long metal chain, remnants from his days as a house slave.

He mutters something nonsensical, like: "Need a waste a helmet of meat so my scalp only peels in," one of his more common shibboleths. His speech is shrill, echoed, and fragmented as always, but noticeably more fatigued than usual.

I think: today has not been a good day for Igor. To be fair, every day is an off-day for Igor, but today especially is not a good day. I think: it's enough that he has to schlepp around all that cumbersome metal with those sprigs for arms, that his continual inability to socialize and sit still while in public or unfamiliar places sentences him to a lifetime of loneliness, that sunlight in _any_ quantity _literally_ burns the skin clean off his shadowy body. In Lumiose City, no less! Probably one of the worst places to live as a pallid introvert, and even worse for someone like Igor. And now he has to be a part of this séance? Now he has to confront that traumatic event of our pasts that have been infused into our very cores, much like how nougat is infused into chocolate?

"Hey Ghost Girl, I'm going home," I say, half serious, half in hopes of rousing a pouty reaction, but she doesn't bite.

"Cool," she says, "no you're not. You want this, Yaud. You can try all you want to be cavalier about it, but I know the truth: you're terrified of confronting your fears, of discovering that what lies on the other side doesn't align with your preconceived expectations of what death is. Or you're afraid something might go wrong, and I quote, 'What if a ghost flies into our lungs and pops our alveoli like bubble wrap, asphyxiating us then and there, or otherwise leaves us with irremissible lung cancer?' First of all, I can guarantee you that has never happened before in the history of ever. Second of all, as your best friend, dealing with your PTSD is downright fatiguing. So as hard as it's going to be—and trust me, I know how hard it is—I'm going to need you to be brave. I'm going to need you to show strength, maybe, for once in your pathetic life and I mean that in the nicest way possible. I promise you won't have to do this alone like you usually do, because I'll be with you the whole time. I'm not going to leave your side."

I stay silent. It's better, I figure, to let her think she is an expert in psychoanalytic inquiry than to revile her with the many gender-specific expletives at my disposal, but which I refrain from using in anticipation of the statistically most common of replies: to cry misogyny and proceed to gather the locals into a lynch mob, which, for lack of a better word, _convinces_ the hapless sexist offender to go on the run.

She sticks out her temptingly severable tongue. "In other words, stop being such a pussy."

"Fine. You're right. I do want to do this. But I don't think I'm ready to do this _now_."

Ghost Girl gives an exasperated sigh and stands up straight, letting the half-sprawled burgundy tablecloth fall to the floor in a sad, miserable pile. She looks to Missy who is hovering in the air, then to me, then back to Missy.

"Missy, call him a pussy."

"I do not really want to do that," Missy says, knowing that only one of us here can understand Pokémon speech. Hint: it's me.

"See? Even Missy thinks you're being a pussy."

"That's not what she said," I retort. "And I think she still resents you for naming her something so uncreative."

"I. Was. Twelve!" Ghost Girl cries with feigned indignance. "Besides, yew wuv it, don't yew Missy?"

Missy displays a look that says: "Eh. So-so. Fifty-fifty. But more importantly, please never talk to me like that again."

"Yaud. Listen," Ghost Girl says with a sudden and uncharacteristic gentleness that catches both me and Igor so off guard that his twitching seems to cease for a full half-second. "You and Igor… You've been through a lot. The fact is, you haven't moved past it. I mean, look at him." She gestures discreetly to the twitchy cretin in the corner who is now scratching his face as though afflicted with an apocalyptic rash. Poor Igor. "He's a mess. And then look at—" She gestures to me. "You're even more of a mess."

I say that her first point is well-taken, but her second is at least a _smidge_ unwarranted, or misguided.

She frowns and gives me a tender look easily misconstrued as an attempt at commiseration. "If you don't want to do this, we don't have to. But this might be the last chance we're ever going to get. I've reread through this entire manual." She holds up _Beginner Mediumship_. "My parents are gone for the weekend. You're soon going to leave for your research trip. The timing is perfect, but it's limited. But again, and I promise you, if you're uncomfortable doing this, then we'll pull the plug right here and spend the rest of the night watching that Diantha rom-com in the living room. I'm your best friend, Yaud. I only want what's best for you."

I think: her terribly obvious connivery-disguised-as-sensitivity proves she thinks I've never had someone tell a lie to my face. Who does she think she's trying to fool? Her sympathy is an obvious pretext for something more sinister. What could it be? Unless…

"And there's also that matter of you being the person I was prophesized to help," she adds coyly and looks to the ceiling, her cheeks darken from rosy to crimson as she whistles a nondescript tune.

Ah, there it is. The prophecy, the whole reason Ghost Girl and her family packed their bags and flew halfway across the globe to Kalos. The whole reason we became friends in the first place. According to her, Morty (apparently Ecruteak's Gym Leader) had woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, his breath tight and apneic and his sheets soaked with piss as a result of some overwhelmingly orgasmic out-of-body cosmic future vision (the wetting the bed part is my addition, but can we really definitively rule that out?) prognosticating the greatness that Meredith Ouija was destined for. This greatness was to manifest as enviable riches, fame, and longevity for her entire family. What a windfall! There was, however, one condition. She was required to complete one (frustratingly ambiguous, I might add) task, that is, to help an "idiosyncratic Kalosian individual" bring about great change in the balance and direction of the world's teleology—AKA, the world's grand purpose, whatever the fuck that means or is.

Well, Morty reportedly was unable to return to sleep that night, so he paid Ghost Girl's family a personal visit. Imagine their annoyance-turned-stupefaction when the face of Ecruteak showed up at the front of their doorstep, alarmingly enervated and clad in purple slippers, at four in the morning! Out of what I interpreted to be blind respect for and unconditional trust in this kooky Gym Leader (let's just say ghosts aren't the only thing afflicting him) and his hocus-pocus words, as well as a far too optimistic outlook regarding their future prospects, the Ouija family found themselves leasing a two story house in a suburb near the outskirts of Lumiose City by the end of the month.

Upon meeting me soon after, she had quickly concluded that _I_ was that veritable idiosyncratic Kalosian individual. "I have never met anyone who wears cynicism on one sleeve and an almost pusillanimous fear of danger on the other" and "You realize only probably, like, five people in the world can talk to Pokémon, right?" and "The closest friend you have ever had is a former house slave who happens to be terrified of little children half his size."

My response that there are probably many others in similar shoes (think: unfortunate older siblings whose parents neglected to check for Down syndrome in utero the second time around), not to mention that there are other people idiosyncratic in their own ways (think: I would never eat my own shit), fell on deaf ears.

"Yes," she would submit, even though she meant the opposite, "but you're unique." As though that somehow wasn't the point of contention the entire time.

So while the whole of our relationship is built predominantly on her misplaced belief that somehow, by helping me shift the course of the world (I should emphasize, ladies and gentlemen, the course of the WORLD) I will be able to usher her parents into a premature retirement _and_ ensure that she, herself, and Missy would never have to work a serious day in their lives.

Yet despite the fact that I am obviously a prop for her presaged success and luxuriance and maybe also for her ceaseless curiosity, there is no mistaking that she's still my best friend, and I'm still hers. She has never tried to hide her motives, so I at least have to give her credit for her candor. Not only that, we were also always there for each other, no questions asked. To think for a second that we wouldn't be friends without this crackpot prophesy hanging over our heads is to patently misrepresent our relationship.

It's rare to see her be this endearing, and in a way it's kind of endearing even if she's only pretending. I have a feeling it would get old real fast; still, and though I hate to say it, she has a point, beguiling as she may be. Igor and I could come up with all sorts of reasons for avoiding a confrontation with our past, but in the end we're just stalling, not without good reason, mind you, but we also can't just sit on our hands waiting for the flesh to necrotize. It's something the two of us have to confront eventually. It's something we promised each other we would confront together.

I look to Igor, hoping for something like an encouraging nod. Instead, I receive a fitful series of spasms that make it look like his entire body is nodding and I realize he is barely conscious, much less paying attention. Poor Igor, I think. Poor Yaud, I think self-absorbently.

"Okay," I say. "Can I help set up?"

She brightens and lets out a restrained squeal, clasping her hands together in an ebullience that truly captures what it means to be Merry.


	2. The Horror That Made It

Author's Note: Again, please forgive me for inconsistencies in my writing as I settle in to the tone and mood of this story. I had a lot of fun writing this; here's chapter two. I appreciate all feedback!

 **Exhuming the Horrors That Made Us  
** **Chapter Two  
** **The Horror That Made It**

" _Nature teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit."  
_ —René Descartes, from the _Sixth Meditation_

* * *

The last remaining smear of orange on the horizon crumples into the vastness of the night. A thick sheen of siloed stars form haphazard connect-the-dots shapes that fuel the fairytale imaginations of little children out stargazing with their parents. High above, the near full-moon watches us raptly, as though expecting tonight's séance to put on a good show. Somehow, I can't shake the feeling either.

I stare out the window a little longer before pulling the drapes shut. Ghost Girl says that one of the most important preconditions of a séance is to minimize the amount of light emanating from all non-candle sources. In other words, no sunlight, starlight, or moonlight; no phosphorescent, LED, or neon light; no light from any fire bigger than your pinky nail; no night lights and no glow sticks; barring one notable exception (Litwick), no bioluminescent light; and especially "none of that fluorescent light bullshit."

I give her the benefit of the doubt, because hell if I'd be bothered to read even a single page of that ghost manual in apprehension of gagging over the trite attempts at humor that I'd no less expect from old ladies with nothing better to do than voluntarily bury themselves alive in coffins as what seems like too offhand of a hands-on approach to better understand how "the modern day spirit has undergone a violent shift in attitude that tears asunder the steadfast threads tethering us to the dirt and feces from which our corporeal husks have been reshaped and remade into anatomically suspect flesh golems."

Okay, so maybe I'm paraphrasing. But still, isn't it funny how totally easy it is to expect that kind of galling mumbo jumbo from Ghost Girl and her ilk?

I think: for the rest of the night I should refrain from thinking any more disparaging thoughts, lest I provoke the vengeful mind-reading spirits to slit my throat with a piece of glass broken off of a champagne bottle sent flying by the supernatural maelstrom bound to have been fomented. Or at least this is what Ghost Girl tells me, and though I'm 99% sure she's fucking with me, I still refuse to check in the manual for myself out of pure, simple spite, not even for the peace of mind that is more than likely waiting for me in the pages. So out of a cautious respect for the 1% chance that I'm wrong, for the 1% chance of getting stabbed through the eye socket by an evil poltergeist, I resolve to _do my best_ to not throw petty mental insults towards Ghost Girl or her—ahem—brilliant ideas.

Doing my best is the best I can do.

* * *

We sit facing each other at the table, unable to discern the expressions on our respective faces in the pitch black of the room. I can guess, however, that she's more than likely taking this opportunity to make stupid faces at me with the assurance that I'm unable to counter in any meaningful way. Somehow I think of the blind and am unnerved by the realization that no one can prove to them the existence of freckles.

"Are you ready?" she says from the dark.

"I want a safe word," I say.

"A what? Oh. Okay then? Will that make you feel better, poor baby?"

"How does 'go fuck yourself with a Cacnea' sound?"

"Nah, too serious, and you're already guaranteed to say that at least once at some point tonight. How about something more easygoing, like, 'smelly feet?' Because your feet are unequivocally putrid."

"Let's get on with it."

"Just so you know, there's a point of no return. Once we've made contact we won't be able to stop, safe word or not. Not unless you want your best friend here to have her right leg growing out of her left boob."

"I could toast to that." It might be horrifying at first but I'm sure it would grow on me. Ghost Girl turned Ghoul Girl! It'd be pretty damn funny.

"Remember the rules. Don't interrupt me. Don't touch me unless I touch you first; scratch that, don't touch _anything_. In other words, just behave yourself. Most importantly, don't think any oedipal thoughts."

Great, _now_ how can I stop?

She strikes a match, imparting a surprising brightness to the room and revealing, among other things, her disappointingly phlegmatic visage. In the corner of the room, Igor is passed out on the floor, his twitchy judders persisting even in his catatonia. Missy floats in the air above us looking chic and dignified, reminding us all that this is one disembodied head of a Pokémon that knows how to accessorize. Hanging off several strategic points throughout the room are rectangular strips of paper with archaic symbols nobody can read anymore imprinted on the front side; apparently charms designed to ward off the most malicious of spirits.

In front of me, Ghost Girl dons a newly bought, never worn snow-white kimono. A hachimaki headband, which supposedly reduces the amount of interference that occurs in the transmission between our world and the spirit world, stretches around her temple. Her long brown hair is in a bun. Between us, at the center of the table, lie three candleholders arranged in a triangular pattern. Resting idly on each of these candleholders is a Litwick, of which Ghost Girl had ordered a set of three from this online medium exchange market called the aByss, or as I like to call it, the aBsurd.

I remind myself: _revere the 1%._ I think: that's something no one can really say anymore in today's charged political atmosphere without receiving a fresh platter of vitriol from their peers. For example: "anybody who doesn't see that the astronomically high taxes disproportionately paid by the poor and middle class of this country are going straight into the King's pockets is an _autistic_ _fucktard_ and should shove a pike up their ass." Yikes. I mean, why stop there? How about: "anyone in support of the Kalos monarchy is a _failed abortion_ and needs to get raped to be taught a lesson." My favorites are the ones that come totally unprovoked: "hey _kind-looking stranger,_ I don't think we've met, so go fuck yourself."

The three Litwick are of discrepant sizes and ages and their personalities all seem to be the polar opposites of each other, if that kind of description even makes sense in a three way relationship. A slender silver wick protrudes from the tops of their bodies like the lone strand of hair of a baldheaded man who stubbornly insists that his youth is just beginning to enter its golden age. Their names, which I learned from an earlier exchange with them, are Helios, Thruster, and Lumi.

Helios is the largest and stumpiest of the three and wields a bored countenance. Apart from his size, his seniority is easily ascertained by the large clumps of melted wax drooping over his eyes and obstructing his vision like the long bangs of an emo haircut that the barber decided to take way too far. That's one of the more interesting things about Litwick; the more their flames are lit the more their wax melts, and the more their wax melts the blinder they become. If the wax doesn't give it away, you can tell from Helios's lethargic face that this séance is just another occurrence of just another day in the life of a household commodity soon due to lose its access to the visual world.

Thruster is the second oldest. Like Helios, a sizable chunk of wax has melted entirely over his right eye, essentially blinding him on that side. But unlike Helios, Thruster is beaming exuberantly as though dazzled that we somehow included him in the first place, as though séances and candle burnings are like school dances he wishes would happen once a week instead of once a semester.

The last Litwick, Lumi, a female, is the smallest and youngest of the trio. Unlike the other two, Lumi shows no signs of any melted wax running down her forehead; in fact, even the wick on her head is perfectly pristine. She's a baby! How the hell did Ghost Girl manage to purchase a baby Litwick, much less a Litwick whose flame cherry hasn't yet been popped? Was she defective? An orphan? Count on Ghost Girl to order a non-uniform set of Litwick. Surely even the spirits appreciate a bit of consistency?

Anyway, Lumi's face is scrunched in a kind of tempered apprehension, meaning she's either 1) frightened out of her mind or 2) excitedly nervous about having her first flame lit. I'm personally a proponent of 3) she's emotionally devastated by the awfully dreary and uninspired name that Ghost Girl had christened her. Lumi? Really? After Lumiose? What an unfortunate series of events, having your first owner be someone whose artistic pastures have been sterilized by her overall general insipidness and pubescence-induced pneumatic fascination. I think: at least she didn't name her Litty.

Ghost Girl dabs the lit end of the match to the comparatively stubby wick on Helios's head. An incandescent yellow-orange blaze swaddles the candle top and caresses the room with that all too familiar smell of burning. His impassive scowl disappears as his eyes close in muted contentment, and I imagine the feeling is analogous to climbing into warm sheets on a freezing night. As the saffron candlelight flails wildly in wait for the combustion process to stabilize, the wax folds covering his eyes liquefy and sag further downward like a languid avalanche having difficulty finding the motivation to move.

Because no one cares for the middle child, I'll skip over what happens with Thruster. When it gets to Lumi's turn I'm stunned by the intensity of the ensuing flame; I guess it's akin to a light bulb shining the brightest the first day it's screwed in. By that logic, I wonder after how many million years will we be able to finally hold staring contests with the sun without scorching our retinas. A shy droplet of melted wax bubbles up and hangs precariously off the edge of Lumi's scalp, diffidently threatening to tumble down the steep decline at a moment's notice, but it doesn't convince anyone. Regardless, that lone drop marks the incipience of Lumi's maturity! People often reproach Litwicks for being soul-sucking parasites, but those same people fail to have any sympathy for their imminent blindness. It's a pretty lame bargain for the Litwick, if you ask me, considering the most harm they're doing is _shining a tiny ass light_ and maybe eating a _little bit_ of your spirit. The punishment seems unreasonably severe. It would be like if God gave you cancer because you masturbated daily. Imagine _that_ existential dilemma: as the days pass their vision becomes more and more compromised until one day—blip!—total darkness! It's a lot like death! The inclement irony of providing light to others while slowly having it be taken away from you. That's why I admire, almost envy, Helios's jadedness when the dreadful promise of a consummate blackout looms in the direction he has no choice but to face.

Ghost Girl gestures me to give her my hands. I begrudgingly comply and look away; squeamish even upon the sight of my own blood. Cold, sharp metal presses down on my right hand middle fingertip; a dull but pointed sting follows, and a vague wetness follows soon thereafter. Ghost Girl repeats the same story on my other hand as well as both of her own hands, using the same fruit knife too! I think: I'm somewhat flattered she trusts that I'm bloodborne pathogen free, but somewhat offended that that's probably because she thinks I'm a virgin. We splay our palms (mine sweaty, hers calloused) out flat on the table, the tips of our bloodied middle fingers touching and exchanging blood. I think: ew, someone else's hemoglobin.

She closes her eyes and begins to incant, and it takes all my willpower to chase out any denigrating remarks that have arisen in my head.

"Oh spirits from the primordial sea, hear our call. Grace our meager physical world with your sublime presence." I sit awkwardly and observe. What else can I do?

"Spirits, walk among us though we are unworthy. Allow the darkness in our hearts to guide you here safely like the lighthouse does the forlorn ship." I think: what an apt simile. NOT. Can we stop bleeding into each other's fingers now?

"Oh spirits of the desolate land, we mere mortals are at the mercy of your power. It is in the utmost piety for the realm of the dead that we beseech you to speak with us, engage with us, commune with us." I purse my lips and look above; for some reason I'm expecting a vortex to tear open where the ceiling is and cast loose a drove of spooky apparitions.

She opens her eyes and gapes absentmindedly at her lap, as though her brain has just dissipated into thin air. I shift my eyes from side to side as minutes pass, expecting at the turn of every second for a gust of wind, a dirge of moans and wails, a glassy wisp in the air, _anything_ , but there's nothing.

I go, "Nothing's happening," but Ghost Girl rolls her eyeballs up in annoyance and shoots me a caustic glare that far too clearly says, "I know nothing's happening, maybe shut the fuck up and wait?" and so I do.

"Spirits," she says, "I channel you. Come to me. I implore you. Speak to us."

I think: this is bullshit and I knew this was never going to work. Case in point: my blasphemous thoughts did _not_ materialize a makeshift glass shiv which was then promptly thrusted into my jugular. Fuck the 1%.

"Speak to us." I notice that the Litwick's orange-yellow flames start to blaze more ferociously, no doubt a suggestive omen.

"Speak to us."

Before I have time to blink, a boiling pain surges through the bleeding slits on my fingers, and I recoil at the instantaneity of it—or I try to, but though my body jerks backwards, my fingertips stay glued to hers as if our wounds were cauterized together. I wince, but her expression remains stoic though I can tell in her hardened eyes that she undoubtedly feels the pain too.

"Speak to us." A bead of sweat streams down my face as the burning sensation begins to fade and I manage to pull my hands away.

"Speak to us." A light breeze brushes against our cheeks and prompts me to turn my head, but nothing's behind me except wallpaper.

"Speak to—AHH!" An abrupt flash of darkness, an otherworldly swarm of solid shadows sweeps across my peripheral. Her neck lurches backwards and her arms spring open as though yanked by puppet strings. She lets out a deafening shriek like someone has impaled her in the abdomen. It startles the shit out of me. She collapses onto the floor with a strenuous pant. The room's temperature drops a sudden thirty degrees: undulations of goosebumps rise in simultaneity across the surface of my skin and a prickling sensation rushes down my nape to my coccyx. The radiant blaze of the candles and the lingering throbbing of the heat in my fingers are diminished by this countervailing rush of cold. An inexplicable feeling of terror drapes over me like a blanket that fails in its basic function to provide warmth, and I find myself paralyzed: not that my muscles can't move or won't move, but that they don't _want_ to move in fear that even the slightest of shivers, the most innocuous of motions, will provoke an undetected spirit to pounce on me. Though I guess it's disingenuous to say it's undetected when I very well _can_ fucking detect some distinct yet indistinct bone-chilling presence in the room _right now_. But while I can pretend to understand what's happening I sure as hell cannot pretend to understand what I'm dealing with or where it is or what mechanism it's employing to alter our tangible reality or why I can suddenly see my breath or why frost is expanding over the room or why, just _why_ , did I agree to this.

"Merry?" She stumbles up from the floor and back onto her chair, her breath not yet fully recovered.

"I'm okay."

"Merry," I say, and I think: all I want to do is to express my modest desire to fall into a peaceful sleep, forget the pain of reality, and be whisked off to dream land where rainbows have never been corny and being heartbroken only hurts half as much, but I lose my words.

"They're here," Ghost Girl marvels, an airy mist escaping her mouth as her jaw slackens outside her notice. I think: _they_? As in you're trying to be gender neutral, or there are more than one?

I find myself praying that it's the former.

She reaches into the sleeve of her kimono and pulls out a piece of amethyst attached to a thin, lengthy string, presumably a pendulum of sorts. She holds the pendulum by the string over the table, which has been sheathed in a layer of frost; the trio of Litwick, whose purple flames have been severely devitalized by the unforeseen fridge-like conditions, shiver relentlessly.

Ghost Girl speaks, seemingly to no particular person, _per se_ , in this room, "Show me 'Yes.' "

The amethyst swings forwards and backwards. I scan her skeptically with the same eyes that may or may not have just hallucinated that suspended piece of violet quartz moving of its own accord.

She gulps as though nervous but her eyes tell an opposite tale: _thrill_. "Show me 'No.' "

There's no sleight of hand, no hint of wind, not the slightest flick of the wrist or shifting of fingers, and yet the amethyst moves. It moves side to side, and a harrowing tremor overtakes me. I think: if this is all some elaborate prank, then I would be staggeringly impressed with her sick dedication to score a laugh at such perilous expenses. I mean, legitimately, I would be impressed. Yeah, our friendship would probably be over, but I would still be _very_ impressed.

She hesitates, obviously thinking of what would be the best first question to kick off this glorified press conference. "Are you a spirit?" she finally asks. No, of course not, silly head! Where—where could you have possibly gotten that idea?

The amethyst swings front to back.

"Are you dead?" Just as sensible, I think! Best to make sure your enemies are dead before you go on chatting with them, am I right?

Front to back.

"Are you going to hurt us?"

Okay, I'll bite. _Are you going to hurt us_? Really? Now _that's_ a moronic question. You can't depend on the preternatural to make promises like that. That's like asking investment bankers if they truly are concerned for the downtrodden. Of course they have to say yes! But everyone knows it's a load. If anything, the spirit probably resents us just for having the capacity to _be_ hurt.

Before I know it, the candleholder Thruster is installed on violently capsizes and his flame sputters out as he face plants on the frozen surface of the tablecloth. Was that the spirit telling me he/she/it can hear my thoughts? Helios and Lumi are visibly shocked by the paranormal intervention and inquire into his okay-ness. Ghost Girl shoots me another one of those glares—damn, how did she know it was me?—and I decide to keep the mouth in my mind shut.

The pendulum swings side to side.

She continues. "Were you born in Kalos?"

It swings front to back.

"Are you a man?"

It swings in a circular motion, so as to say: "that's not the question you should be asking."

"So then," she waits, "are you a child?" Upon registering what she just asked, my breath stops; it feels like my thyroid has squeezed into my trachea. In the barely any seconds it takes for the spirit to respond, I will have already choked.

Those seconds pass. The pendulum swings front to back.

She mouths to me: "are you getting this shit?" and tosses me another look—a look whose meaning I'm having trouble deciphering amid all this insanity.

"Are you a girl?"

Side to side. A gulp. A quaver. From both of us.

"Are you a boy?"

Front to back.

"What's your name? Does it start with a consonant?"

Front to back. We catch each other's eyes, and this time she's the one trying to decipher my expression.

"Does it start with a C?"

Side to side.

"Does it start with a B?"

Front to back.

No. That makes no fucking sense. There's no way… whoever or whatever is moving that pendulum _can't_ be Blair. Because if that'sBlair, then _who the fuck is inside Igor?_

"Is your name Blair?"

Front to back. I can hardly bear the anguish. Sweat rains down from my temple and my foot cramps; I taste bile at the back of my throat. I look to the still out-cold Igor, whose somnolent indifference to a revelation which would seem likely to ferment a fairly potent identity crisis is quite the attitude to envy. I look to Missy, who looks uncharacteristically rattled.

"Is your last name—"

"Wait," I say. I ransack my brain for excuses, reasons, motives, for impulses and phobias and reservations and grudges, for heartache and corruption and despair and self-aggrandizements, for racism and schadenfreude and homophobia and taboo fetishes, for anything I can talk about that paints me as a horrible person, but not horrible enough for what I did to Blair to be believable.

I want to say something, to preemptively vindicate myself from accusations that I know are coming. I want to apologize without looking guilty but I also want to _feel_ guilty without _being_ guilty—such as when a baby cries upon seeing your face as though it were the ugliest thing in the world and you can't help but feel like a sack of shit even though no, you protest, you've personally seen numerous people far uglier than you and if anyone is at the fault, it's the baby.

Ghost Girl wears a look of concern. "Yaud, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We knew it was possible but not likely that Blair _himself_ would actually show up. Do you understand how much we can afford to learn from this? I don't know about you but I would take the real thing over a surrogate any—"

"Smelly feet." Our safe word, and my get-out-of-jail-free card. And so, at the end of the day, I can't muster up the courage to confront Blair after all, or even to confirm that the spirit in this room even is Blair. I think: I really hope that isn't you, Blair. You've been dead for nine years. If that's you, please move on. You can't come back here anymore. You're no longer like the rest of us.

Ghost Girl averts her gaze. She is hoping the pregnant silence will bear the fruits of my acquiescence.

"Smelly feet. That's our safe word, remember? Let's stop. I've had enough." Hot tears well in my eyes. I think: it's enough that we are constantly being pursued by death, and now we cannot even escape the dead?

"I told you," she said in a low whisper, "We can't stop once we've established communication—not until we see it through to the end and give the spirit a proper farewell—I mean, did you forget about the leg-growing-out-of-boob thing!?"

"And I told you," I start, and I hesitate, and I reconsider whether I should say the words I'm rehearsing in my head, all the while weighing the regret I would probably feel tomorrow morning versus the utterly despicable and ephemeral satisfaction I would feel right now, from hurting Ghost Girl the way her séance has hurt me.

No regrets.

"And I told you—I told you back when we first met, and back when you first came to me with this preposterous idea to hold a séance," her face grows ashen while mine grows livid, "that Blair is gone. He's gone he's gone he's gone. And he's not coming back, because he _can't_ come back. How many times do I have to say it!? His spirit was devoured! Okay!? Igor consumed it! He absorbed it! He appropriated it, converted it into energy, and annexed his personality!"

"You can't know that for sure! Remember why we agreed to do this séance in the first place: to gather clues surrounding the mystery of Blair and Igor. There is a nigh omniscient being right here in my dining room—and so far he, or she, has been very complaisant—that potentially has all the answers we're seeking. Not to mention, you were just a child and… and in all likelihood you were in shock and you're not remembering things accurately and—"

"I remember perfectly clearly. That—whatever _that_ is—is not Blair. I'd sooner trust a trafficker with my child than this ghost to tell us the truth. In fact, it takes a special kind of sick, deranged, incorrigible _monster_ to pose as the estranged spirit of my late younger brother. So you know what?"

Ghost Girl, appalled, shakes her head no, not that she doesn't know the answer to my question—she absolutely knows the answer to my question—but that she is urging me, _begging_ me, to not say the answer aloud.

"This great and powerful spirit, or whatever the fuck you call him, can eat my shit off the floor. If it's a farewell ceremony he wants so badly, he can find it where my foot is about to be: in his ass."

The amethyst starts to thrash about in an unbridled frenzy and Ghost Girl drops it onto the table in shock. The trio of Litwick flee for their lives and huddle behind Igor in the corner. Not long after, the table flips over and crashes into the wall, where it leaves a dent that foregoes all our plans to hide this imbroglio from her parents. I think: well, that went about as expected.

There is a silent moment in which she and I stare at each other wide-eyed, the two of us uncertain about whether we should be concerned for each other's safety or hating each other's guts.

The moment doesn't last long. Ghost Girl's neck jolts back aggressively as though once again seized by invisible puppet strings: her limbs and fingers twist and contort into awkward shapes and positions that I'm pretty sure are anatomically infeasible for a girl like her who never stretches, much less does any yoga. Her legs bend upwards at the joints in weird angles, and though her feet are no longer touching the floor she somehow remains afloat. Great, now she's levitating! When her head finally droops back down, I meet a pair of starch blank eyes for which the phrase "whites of eyes" have become utterly and terrifyingly synonymous with "eyes," as though her eyeballs rolled a full 180 degrees into her skull. How cruel, I think, for the spirit to invade her body without giving us a chance to sort through our turbulence. Missy delivers a blistering scream in horror, and who can blame her? This tortuous effigy floating before us easily earns a spot on one of those viral top ten scariest phenomena lists, not to mention her trainer is currently being possessed by some deleterious spirit!

Then Ghost Girl opens her mouth and speaks and I don't recall a moment in my life where I have ever gone this pale in such brief an instant.

"Big brother," she says, except it's not her voice.

It's Blair's, as frail and high-pitched as it was the day he died. I find myself at the crossroads of what to believe. Could this truly be Blair? But then what does that make Igor? I inch forward as though greater proximity to the occupied physical form would help me make a clearer determination. By some astounding feat of wishful thinking, the idea that this could just be the ploy of a deceitful spirit slowly filters out of my mind.

"Blair?" I say, "That can't be you. There is no way that's you," and here the words escape without my express permission, "is there?"

"I'm here, big brother. Let's go outside and play."

I think: It _is_ him. It sounds _exactly_ like him. Everything from his tone, his accent, his infantile pronunciation of words, the way he always so formally addresses me as his big brother, the way he always asks me to leave the house to play be there a late autumn downpour or an oppressive summer heat.

My jaw clenches over this overwhelming development. Blair is alive. He's alive! Well, he's a spirit, technically, but I guess, in a way, he's alive! I think: no longer do I need to live with the guilt that I sent an ingenuous young boy to the emptiness of oblivion; no longer do I need to fantasize about what kind of person Blair would have grown up to be had he survived—because he's in front of me right now! Granted, it's his spirit and not his actual body, but this is all the proof I need to be convinced that even though his physical self died, his spiritual self lives on. The fact that he managed to stay intact for so long amid the brutality of the spirit world is no small feat either. The little rascal, how the hell did he pull it off?

"Blair!" I cry. "I can't believe you're alive."

"But big brother," he says without hesitating, and here my heart skips a beat, "I'm dead."

"Wh-what? No, I know you're dead. I meant, your spirit is alive! Look! You're speaking to me and I'm speaking to you. We're communicating. Isn't that all it takes?"

"Big brother," he repeats, "I'm dead."

"Blair..."

"I'm dead, and I'm not coming back."

Of course, I know he can't come back. You can't just insert a spirit into a dead body and hope the two would harmonize. But surely we could still have a relationship, right? He doesn't have to cut me off. He could visit me and we would go out to play on the weekends, and though he couldn't exactly throw a ball, we could still cavort through fields of tall grass and complain about our workaholic mother like we would always do back when he was still alive.

"I'm dead, big brother. And it's your fault that I'm dead."

Here my heart snaps into two.

"Why would you say that to me?" Even though I knew the answer, I somehow couldn't help but blurt it out as though to preserve the illusion of innocence were a natural human reflex.

"Because you killed me. If you just listened to Igor, I would still be alive. But big brother, you hated Igor. You treated him like garbage. You thought he was just a slave and because of that you would always do the opposite of what he told you. Because of that, I died. And it was all your fault."

The pressure waxes in my sinuses and an inundation of emetic hysteria topples my volition. I retch, but it's just a dry-heave, and I lament: I'm denied even the satisfaction of puking. By now my speech is reduced to a feeble whimper, though it's the most heartfelt whimper I can ever claim to have harnessed. And astonishingly, as though all the recalcitrant callouses of my heart have been peeled away, for the first time in nine years I foreclose on the last remaining shred of dignity which has shamefully overstayed its welcome within the house of my soul, hoping that by locking the doors and drawing the blinds my crime against humanity would never catch up to it. For the first time in nine years, my facade of aloofness is stripped away. For the first time in nine years, I break down in a melodramatic fit of heartfelt sobs.

I want to say that I'm sorry, that I'm so sorry. I want to say that I'm a festering pile of shit for a person, and that he's right: I pay for his death every waking and sleeping minute of my life. I want to say that the haunting image of his lifeless eyes gleams in the sky of my dreamscapes where the moon should be, that every kid I pass on the street only reminds me of how happy he always was despite everything, how brave he was even as he lay there, dying, bleeding out, and that the last words he strained to say to me remain to this day the maxim by which I live my life. I want to say that he had so much happiness ahead of him and I'm so sorry I stole that away from him. I want to ask him to forgive me, as selfish as it would be to ask that.

But I don't say any of that. How could I, when the tears are so overwhelming, when at this moment I'm nothing but a blubbering buffoon?

After it finally feels like I can talk again, I manage to sputter out, "I'm sorry, Blair."

He, or rather Ghost Girl's body, smiles. "Big brother, the spirits sent me here to tell you something. They want me to tell you to go fuck yourself. That the living do not get to apologize to the dead, let alone the murderer to his victim. That to commit such a reprehensible act is a testament to your irreverence for the dead, and for that you shall be punished. They want me to tell you that you're disgusting, that you're repugnant to the core, and that I should be happy I didn't have to stay alive and tolerate you and your bullshit."

 _Holy shit_ , so that's how it feels to have a stake driven through your heart. The _spirits_ are telling him to send this message? And he's just blindly going along with it? Who the fuck are these other spirits anyhow?

"Big brother, these spirits... they're very upset with you. They want me to tell you that the subject of my death is supposed to be, but somehow you've made it about you. That to you, my death is no longer just an event to grieve and regret; it's now your excuse for why you're afraid to eat food off the floor or sleep with the lights off. That to you, my death is nothing but a plot device to move forward the wounded narrative of your vapid life and to cast the illusion that your neurotic habits and decisions—which have done nothing but perpetuate your seclusion—have some compelling justification. They want me to ask you if you think having to watch me die was bad. They want me to ask you if you think having to be there as I breathed my last breath was bad. They want me to tell you to try actually dying. Try actually breathing a last breath. Try having to watch your own blood pour out over your disemboweled intestines after being cut in half. Try having to think: 'this is it.' They want me to tell you that a mortal like you knows jack fucking shit. They want me to tell you to take your sorry and shove it up your ass."

I'm not sure if it's the deadpan brutality or the pugnacious reprimands or the heartache that Blair's allegiance is with the spirits instead of me or the realization that though I always expected if Blair were to have survived he would have been upset at me but not to the extent that "apathetic and dismantling" becomes a suitable pair of adjectives to attach. And I'm not sure if it's that Missy has been shrieking into my pressure-blocked ears for the past minute and in all probability irreversibly damaging my eardrums or the thrashing movement in the corner of my eye that turns out to be Igor's sleep spasms which clobber into me the reminder that, no, whoever is inside Ghost Girl's body right now isn't Blair, because I saw Blair be absorbed by Igor, I saw Blair's spirit pass into Igor's sapphire eyes, I _see_ Blair inside Igor every day: his eccentricities, his witty antics, his unabated compassion. Whoever has possessed Ghost Girl has played me like a fool.

I'm not sure if it's any of that, but it starts to feel as though a haze is releasing its grip on me, without my even knowing a haze was there in the first place! Like one of those surreal-yet-real dreams that keep proving you wrong for thinking it feels too real to be a dream by cruelly yanking you back to alertness just to make a frivolous point, and suddenly Missy's heretofore-muffled shrieking in my ear becomes clear as day: "THAT. IS. NOT. BLAIR! YOU. ARE. BEING. HYPNOTIZED!"

I'm yanked into alertness. Maybe it's not so frivolous after all.

Everything is so clear now! The horror of being helplessly castigated by the spirit of my younger brother two years my junior (eleven years if you don't count the past nine of his death, and I think: if our spirits visually manifest as the image of our physical bodies at the moment of our death, why the hell would anyone want to die in old age?) fades like a distant memory; and that is something I realize now: as horrible as this is to say, Blair _is_ a distant memory. Blair is dead, he has been dead, his spirit unsalvageable. That's something I've believed for a long time now, even if I can't irrefutably prove it. I loathe the very idea that Blair would have taken death as harshly as his impostor has been purporting. His impersonation of Blair, while convincing down to a tee in his intonations and motives, misses the entire point of what made Blair, Blair. And that was his unyielding recalcitrance amidst the trumped-up charges life had condemned him on, his refusal to quit smiling even as he was being kissed by death's rancid mouth.

"You're not Blair," I say, but before I have a chance to launch into an inexorable tirade about how death, for Blair, would at most be a slight inconvenience like having to piss in a bush instead of a toilet and to threaten, emptily, to send Missy in there if he doesn't within the next two seconds get the fuck out of my best friend's body and go back to hell from where he unambiguously came, he interrupts me.

"I am Blair, big brother. The spirits are disappointed in you. They want you to know that your time is coming and that the day of your judgment will be something we will all celebrate. I have to go now, big brother. Good-bye. " And with that ominous final sendoff, Ghost Girl's eyes close and the grotesque arrangement of her limbs unfurl back into a configuration that makes sense. As the spirit (ostensibly, at least) leaves her body and sends her falling, Missy reacts quickly and catches her with her psychic powers before she suffers a concussion. The feeling slowly begins to return to my fingers as the temperature in the room rises back to normal and the frost sublimates.

Knowing that Missy can't hold such a heavy object for long, I take Ghost Girl into my own arms. I carry out that whole overworked procedure: checking her pulse, shaking her vigorously, slapping her around, asking if she's okay. Soon enough, she comes to.

"God," she says in a drowsy groan. "That was awful." Missy drifts around her body checking for superficial damage.

"How do you feel?"

"I just said it was awful."

"Did you understand what was going on? Were you conscious the whole time?"

"Yes. It felt like I was being raped."

"What? No shit?"

"I'm serious."

"Fuck that ghost."

"This is the first time a spirit has possessed me without my consent." She throws aside her hachimaki headband in frustration and picks up the amethyst pendulum from the ground. "Fat load of good this did. Spirits are supposed to either act through the amethyst or not at all."

I flip the switch on the wall. Light from the ceiling supplants the darkness. "We should get you to a Pokémon center, make sure you didn't twist a bone or something."

"I'm just a little sore around the joints. Like he didn't feel the need to be delicate with an angel like me."

"You're serious about the rape thing?"

"I'm fine."

"You should talk to someone."

"I'm fine!"

"Merry!"

"It's not your business!"

I search for words, scanning the room as though I were searching for objects instead. "That wasn't really Blaire," I finally say, as though it were a matter-of-fact, but then I add, "Was it?"

Now it's her turn to search for words. "No, no, I don't think so. Unless the infernal pits of hell suddenly enslaved your baby brother and turned him into a deranged messenger for the devil, no. Still, we can't rule it out. I don't know. I really don't know. I'll have to consult some experts on the aByss."

"That spirit," Missy chimes in while telekinetically flipping through the pages of _Beginner Mediumship_ , "was unlike anything we have ever summoned before. I have no idea what went wrong; we followed procedure and everything. Logically… logically, that spirit should not have the power to be able to rebel against us like that and take over the medium against her will."

"Earlier you were screaming into my ear that that wasn't Blair. Did you mean it?"

"I said that to try to snap you out of your trance. Spirits and certain Ghost-types have the power to take your negative emotions and amplify it a hundredfold. But what just happened to you, I have never seen before. Your feelings were so intense that your body forced itself into hypnosis as a defense mechanism. As for whether that was Blair: I cannot, in good conscience, say. There is simply no way to be sure. I do not doubt your story, Yaud, the one about Igor consuming Blair. But the realm of spirits has far more complex natural laws than this physical realm can conceive of. Case in point: look at what that spirit was able to do to you. Not even my shrieks could wake you, and they do not seem to have done any damage to you at all. I cannot imagine the kind of hopeless, terrible place you were in during that trance. At one point you turned to me—I do not know if you were conscious of it—and you whispered to me and told me to… to…"

I raise an eyebrow. "To what?"

She pauses. "To kill you."

Gotta be shitting me. Me? Really? Did I really express a desire for assisted suicide? Even subconsciously, the notion of suicide is something I never would have imagined would ever dare to approach vicinity of my inner mind in fear of its strict trespassing laws. The thought of suicide would get repressed in a second, entombed in the deep nebula of my unconscious. Not that I'm particularly afraid of death—or maybe I am?

No, what frightens me is the _dying_ , which by all accounts is not too honest a term. As far as I'm concerned, so long as you're alive, whether you're terminally ill or terminally healthy, you're still terminal, still dying. It's pointless to talk about dying! No doubt dying's a bummer, but life too is a disappointment; why disjoint the two? Let's call it what it really _is_ : just, living! The germs and the steel, the flash flood to the riptide, the quicksand to the sandstorm, terrorist attacks to zombie epidemics. Really, they're all just fatal symptoms of life. What's the difference? The point is, we're all going to die someday! And to choose to expedite that process through suicide says a lot about how much in the shitter your life is.

For me, it's awful to think that my life could be so bitterly disappointing that I would have rather had Missy kill me than continue being tortured by the harrying memory of my younger brother. Really, no one knows what happens when you die, not even the mediums. The existence of spirits don't tell us jack other than the fact that sometimes spooky shit goes down in the world. Are spirits truly consciousnesses? Or are they just empty husks parroting a formerly living creature, much like how cartoon characters seem like real people until we realize they're fucking cartoons. Dr. Chalmers, the psychiatrist that Professor Sycamore once coaxed me into seeing, argued that my concerns about reconciling death and living will dissolve and cease to matter once I'm actually dead. Yes, very reassuring. How about I also just cut out my liver to eradicate the possibility of liver damage?

I really can't believe it. I'm reminded suddenly of the one time Ghost Girl characterized me as someone overly suspicious of of otherwise harmless situations in the unlikely event that they would result in bodily harm. Omniphobia, she called it. Fear of everything, in fear that everything is dangerous.

I burst out laughing.

What's so funny?" asks Ghost Girl.

"Missy says that I asked her to kill me."

"What? You!?" Ghost Girl, also seeing the hilarity, joins me in laughter. "Hah! Did you forget how he flunked sky battling because he was too afraid to glide off that rooftop on a Pidgeot? Are you sure all your marbles are in place, Missy?"

"Coming from you, that is—how do you say—rich?"

I translate what Missy says to Ghost Girl, and we all share an earnest laugh. For a moment the atmosphere lightens up considerably as though all three of us were ready to put what would otherwise be an irrevocably traumatic incident behind us. For a moment, it seems like everything is going to be okay.

 _Thud._

The hell was that?

 _Thud._

The relieved smiles on our faces fade. The sound is coming from above. The atmosphere that was just seconds ago sanguine has now grown tense, like when someone apologizes for making an unfunny joke and then goes on a rant about the circular injustice of how everyone hates him because he has no friends and he has no friends because everyone hates him. I'm secondhand cringing just thinking about it, and I think: the only real game-changer in that scenario would be someone from the audience letting a huge one rip.

 _Thud._

"Okay, I'll bite," I say. "Is this another ghost? One that somehow managed to slip through the cracks?"

 _Thud._

Ghost Girl gawps at the ceiling, her hand by her ear. She is listening for something specific.

 _Thud._

Horror daubs over her face and she turns to Missy; and it's like looking into a mirror because their expressions are the exact same. I think: is there something I'm missing? Why have I felt like the stupidest person in this room all day today? Oh right, because Igor is unconscious.

 _Thud_.

"We have an intruder," Ghost Girl says, and there's a slight stammer in her voice that she tries to conceal but I pick up on it.

"So like another... spirit? Or…?"

"No," says Missy. "Not a spirit. A spirit cannot directly generate physical phenomena in the material world without the aid of a medium through which it can channel and stabilize its energy."

"Those thuds are footsteps," says Ghost Girl. "And spirits do not have feet to step with."

 _Thud._

"So like, a burglar? House thieves are not quite exactly what I would call a worst-case scenario," I say.

 _Thud_.

"That's coming from my attic. There are no windows in my attic. A burglar can't get in that way." She slowly backs up toward the wall and covers half her face with her hand. She pulls on the collar of her kimono, not to show me her cleavage, which in all honesty is nothing to write home about, but to ventilate herself. Sweat dribbles down the surface of her skin and dampens the folds of her robe. Her cheeks turn from a rosy red to a feverish one.

I think: it's not every day you see Ghost Girl more jittery and clammy than Igor. Oh, the kick he would get out of this if he were conscious, and the kick I would get from the kick he would get! One of the most humiliating experiences a human being can possibly have is being the subject of Igor's mockery. You know your life has hit rock bottom when the most unfortunate living creature in the world is deriving pleasure from your misery.

 _Thud._

"Ok, ok. I can't bear this anymore. I'm just too curious. One of you ghost freaks please tell me what's making that sound. For the record, my money is still on a spirit."

A thud. Another thud. A tumble that sounds like tripping. Moments later, a splintering sound booms through the house, like the sound of someone punching through wood. _Exactly_ like the sound of someone punching straight through an inch-thick panel of wood.

"Wait. Did whatever-that-thing-is just punch a hole through your attic?"

And as though to vindicate my doubt that intangible beings truly do possess the capacity to rupture holes through wooden floors, the light from the ceiling starts to oscillate from on to off to on to off in a rabid flicker that unapologetically distorts the diachronic coherence of my vision. One second I see Ghost Girl's ugly face, the next second it's as though I'm in the middle of a cavern awaiting to be feasted on by a swarm of Zubat whose hazy shapes I swear I can see between the disconsonant flashes of light and darkness. Finally, after what seems like menu-ordering indecision on the part of the light, as though it can't seem to choose between an appetizer with a small serving size or an overpriced combo meal that comes with a free soda, it blacks out completely, once again plunging the room into darkness and authoritatively depriving us of our last remaining source of comfort.

Tripping over objects? Punching through wood? Manipulating electrical currents to turn off lights? Like Missy said, those aren't things a _spirit_ can do, especially not without the aid of a medium. And that's when I realize that there _are_ beings who, although similar to spirits in many respects, are ultimately unbeholden to the rules and confines set forth by any medium or surrogate.

Ghost-types.

"All right," I declare, "I would now like to take my money off the spirit."

 _Plop_. It's dropped down from the attic to the floor above us.

Ghost Girl inhales sharply, and while she motions to wipe the sweat off her brow, I can tell that what she's really doing is clearing the tears from her eyes.

"It's Maggie," she says. "She's testing out her new legs."


End file.
